The unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera Read Free Book Online

to see the culprit penalized. That is why
she insisted her daughter remain with her in the world of immodesty, where
youth and beauty mean nothing, where the world is nothing but a vast concentration
camp of bodies, one like the next, with souls invisible.
    Now we can better understand the
meaning of Tereza's secret vice, her long looks and frequent glances in the
mirror. It was a battle with her mother. It was a longing to be a body unlike
other bodies, to find that the surface of her face reflected the crew of the
soul charging up from below. It was not an easy task: her soul—her sad, timid,
self-effacing soul—lay concealed in the depths of her bowels and was ashamed to
show itself.
    So it was the day she first met
Tomas. Weaving its way through the drunks in the hotel restaurant, her body
sagged under the weight of the beers on the tray, and her soul lay somewhere at
the level of the stomach or pancreas. Then Tomas called to her. That call
meant a great deal, because it came from someone who knew neither her mother
nor the drunks with their daily stereotypically scabrous remarks. His outsider
status raised him above the rest.
    Something else raised him above the
others as well: he had an open book on his table. No one had ever opened a book
in that restaurant before. In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a
secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of
crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and
above all, the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas
Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life
she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects:
she loved to walk down the street with a
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    book
under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the
dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
    (Comparing the book to the elegant
cane of the dandy is not absolutely precise. A dandy's cane did more than make
him different; it made him modern and up to date. The book made Tereza
different, but old-fashioned. Of course, she was too young to see how
old-fashioned she looked to others. The young men walking by with transistor
radios pressed to their ears seemed silly to her. It never occurred to her that
they were modern.)
    And so the man who called to her
was simultaneously a stranger and a member of the secret brotherhood. He called
to her in a kind voice, and Tereza felt her soul rushing up to the surface
through her blood vessels and pores to show itself to him.
9
    After
Tomas had returned to Prague from Zurich, he began to feel uneasy at the
thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable
fortuities.
    But is not an event in fact more
significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to
bring it about?
    Chance and chance alone has a
message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected,
repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its
message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee
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    grounds at the bottom of a cup.
    Tomas appeared to Tereza in the
hotel restaurant as chance in the absolute. There he sat, poring over an open
book, when suddenly he raised his eyes to her, smiled, and said, "A
cognac, please."
    At that moment, the radio happened
to be playing music. On her way behind the counter to pour the cognac, Tereza
turned the volume up. She recognized Beethoven. She had known his music from
the time a string quartet from Prague had visited their town. Tereza (who, as
we know, yearned for "something higher") went to the concert. The
hall was nearly empty. The only other people in the audience were the local
pharmacist and his wife. And although the quartet of musicians on stage faced
only a trio of spectators down below, they were kind enough not to cancel the
concert, and gave a private performance of the last three